Alexander Armstrong fears for radio's time-keeping pips

In his monthly column, Alexander Armstrong mourns his analogue radio and the
punctuality of its pips

Alexander ArmstrongPhoto: REX FEATURES

By Alexander Armstrong

12:15PM GMT 21 Jan 2014

I fear for the pips. Not all pips of course, there are some pips about which I feel positively bullish. The dried melon pips for example that live in our drawer, they’re going to be fine. We pierced them with a needle and strung them on to some thread so they could be a “tribal” necklace for our middle son about two years ago and they will sit in a drawer in honour of that moment until either the pips or the thread start to perish. Hard-bitten will be the hand that throws those dear pips away. Gladys Knight’s backing band also, I reckon, are in the clear; their induction into Rock and Roll’s Hall of Fame back in 1996 has, I hope, assured them of their place in history. Over the years Douglas Booth, John Mills, Anthony Calf, Jeremy Irvine, Ioan Gruffudd, and Michael York have all given differing but perfectly acceptable performances in their respective lead roles in Great Expectations, I have no concerns on any of their accounts. These pips are all fine.

No, the pips I am worrying about are those that mark the hour on BBC Radio, the ones before which John Humphrys says “OurproducerswereKennethAinsworthandSallyHargreavesgoodmorning” every morning. Those pips. I like those pips. I like them very much. But on digital radio they are meaningless. On Christmas Eve when we tried to have the carols from King’s playing throughout the house, the kitchen DAB radio, the Sonos system, the telly via Sky, and the BBC Radio app on my iPhone all turned out to be wildly out of sync with each other. There was nearly a minute between “alleged 3 o’clock” on the kitchen radio and that on the BBC app. I can’t deny the satisfaction of the solid digital signal – I enjoy hearing Test Match Special, for instance, without the news in Kazakh and Act 2 of Der Fliegende Holländer duking it out on the same wavelength – but for the first time I had pangs for the analogue days of yore. They may have been prone to interference and a challenging listen under bridges, but by God they were punctual.

It’s very decent of the rest of the world to have allowed us to order the year so exquisitely to our convenience. Good of them to let us put Christmas just where it suited us and call New Year just at the point where days are imperceptibly but definitely lengthening. Imagine how strange it must feel to be thinking January thoughts of renewal when the harvest is almost on. If I lived in Cape Town I’d be tempted to listen to carols in the depths of June, which is probably just when the service from King’s is coming through “live” on some of the slower streams.